How Zenzi made Mumbai cool

The hippest, trendiest neighbourhood in India

Around 1am on October 9, 2011, 200-odd people stumbled out of Bandra’s iconic lounge-bar, Zenzi, shouting obscenities at the top of their voices. At least until the police arrived to disperse them. The target of their booze-fuelled ire was the resident of a second-floor flat in the same building: a man who had spent the past two years running a campaign to shut the place down, and finally succeeded. During its seven-year run, the bar – along with Zenzi Mills, its short-lived outpost in Lower Parel – acted as ground zero for Mumbai’s alternative music and arts scene. Set amid the boutique shops and posh restaurants of Bandra’s tree-lined Waterfield Road, it was a haven for the suburb’s creative community, at a time when everyone else was falling over themselves to attract the Bollywood and socialite crowd. Diners sampled the bar’s Euro-Indian fusion while occasionally gawking at the stoned, black T-shirted teens trooping in and out of the small cube that served as a performance space. The al fresco patio was an informal gallery of sorts, displaying the works of the artists and photographers who hung out there. Every night, the venue’s resident DJs would spin some of the most cutting edge electronica in the country, while many of the country’s biggest indie acts cut their teeth playing to 50-odd people in its intimate inner room. Zenzi was abuzz as Manchester in the early Nineties, that legendary scene that gave the world Oasis, James and The Stone Roses, just all condensed to one cramped space, in India. But it also hosted poetry readings, musicals and dance performances. Zenzi was, to quote music journalist and NH7 co-founder Arjun Singh Ravi, “the heart and soul of anything experimental that was happening in the city.” It was as close as we were going to get to being 24-hour Party People.

And now it was gone.

“It all started one drunken evening,” says 53-year-old Anil Kably, one of Zenzi’s founding partners, over a glass of single malt at his breezy seaside flat in Bandra. A short, wiry man, perpetually dressed in shorts and a faded band T-shirt, this old punk survived Bandra’s opioid Eighties and narcotic Nineties, and by the early Noughties was running a textile business with two Israeli partners. One night, over drinks “at this great bar in Tel Aviv,” he says he suggested it would be “interesting to start something like this in India.”

Anil had forgotten about the conversation the next morning, or possibly afternoon, and didn’t think of it again until he got an unexpected phone call a few months later.

“On New Year’s Day 2004, I got a call from [his textile partner] Avi Cabili, asking me to put on my lipstick and eyeliner and go meet my future partners at the Taj [Land’s End].” Shaking off his hangover, Kably headed over to meet brothers Georgy and Philip Bedier de Prarie, who owned the popular Amsterdam bar, Vazkuid, and were in Mumbai looking to expand. Things fell in place quickly. Vazkuid sous chef Shahaf Shabtay was brought in as executive chef and his friend Matan Schabracq came to manage the new space. Doors opened that July, with a launch party that immediately put Zenzi at odds with Mumbai’s established party scene, “a mix of B-grade Bollywood choots and Page 3 celebrities that had no clue,” says Kably. “And Matan kind of weirded it up by asking Bobby Darling to come and be the door bitch, with the boa and everything.”

Mumbai’s bar and club scene at the time was in limbo: Many of the big post-liberalization clubs were either struggling or closing down, due to lack of profits and/or police harassment. Fire ’N’ Ice, Mikanos and the massive 15,000sqft Velocity all tanked in 2004, and the clubs that survived did so by sticking squarely to Top 40 hits and Bollywood remixes. Largely centred around South Mumbai, and inspired by the UK’s elitist, fashion-obsessed techno clubs, they were also stiff, formal affairs that made partygoers negotiate several barriers to get on the dance floor. Meanwhile, Bandra was undergoing its transformation from a sleepy suburb with a global village feel to an actual global village. Its liberal atmosphere and Westernized aesthetic made it an attractive destination for Mumbai’s emerging creative class, as well as the expats and returning NRIs that were then only trickling into the city. This influx, coupled with rising real estate prices and the loosening of rent controls under the Maharashtra Rent Control Act (1999), is why a 1BHK apartment in Bandra now costs an arm, a leg and your first-born. And that’s not counting the security deposit.

“It was a magnet for a certain creative type of people,” says writer, musician and longtime Bandra resident Jeet Thayil, who now lives in Delhi. “You’d find them in Brooklyn, you’d find them in Berlin, and you’d find them in Bandra.”

Amid the demographic churn, it was Schabracq, Kably and their partners’ vision to make Zenzi into “Bandra’s Living Room”, a laid-back space that allowed people to be themselves, not feign hip, with obnoxious door policies – none of the shoes-shirts-couples nonsense that dominated the city’s upmarket venues at the time, and still does. “The nightlife scene then was very corporate, and we were targeting the more creative people – the musicians, the artists, the advertising people,” explains Schabracq over the phone from Amsterdam. “And basically they don’t like to dress up for nobody.” Schabracq was insistent that Zenzi wouldn’t be a place that went out of its way to cater to Bollywood celebrities and socialites. It didn’t matter if you were a struggling copywriter or a name that guaranteed a hit film. You’d get the same service if you ordered an Old Monk or a bottle of champagne.

“Of course,” laughs Schabracq, “we never did sell a bottle of champagne. “Once some Bollywood star entered with their sunglasses on at night and we started laughing at him,” he remembers. “You look like an idiot, get out! You don’t belong here.”

In between repeated spins of his newest acquisition, a first-press vinyl of The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Munki, Kably tells me of the time Kareena Kapoor walked in and stood around for 15 minutes, waiting for someone to escort her to a table. “Finally, I realized who it was and asked Matan what to do,” he says. “He said ‘Fuck it, let her wait’.” Eventually, she turned around and left.

After a couple months’ PR buzz, the novelty wore off for Mumbai’s party elite, who went back to their old, comfortable, ego-friendly haunts. But it was exactly this laid-back, no-fucks- given attitude that endeared Zenzi to its core patrons. By the end of 2004, many of Zenzi’s regulars had already moved in and made it their home. You had what Schabracq calls the “been there, done that crowd”, a group of grizzled nightlife veterans, including Jeet Thayil, actor and producer Denzil Smith, former Indus Creed drummer Bobby Duggal and Kably himself. At the same time, there were up-and-coming musicians like Pentagram guitarist and producer Randolph Correia, as well as Bhavishyavani Future Soundz crew DJs Mathieu Josso and Charles Nuez. Film editor Anand Subaya would pop in every week, as would designer and Xtrathin design agency head Karthikeyan Ramachandran. As these regulars took over Zenzi’s bar and smoking section, they also brought in other people from their respective scenes. And at the centre of it all was Schabracq himself, the bar manager (and now also a partner at the club, having bought out a founding partner) who knew everybody, partied with everybody and would regularly end up at the after-parties as well. “He was just a guy who wanted to know you, it didn’t matter who you were,” says Kably. “He was also a good-looking boy and women loved him. And I loved the fact that women loved him because it brought people in.”

Zenzi’s other secret weapon was Kris Correya, brought in by Schabracq to be the bar’s resident DJ and music programmer. A veteran of Mumbai’s underground electronica scene, Correya had already held wildly popular residencies at J49 and Razzberry Rhinoceros, but by 2004 had grown disillusioned with both the dated techno and progressive house scenes (the tired ubiquity he calls “big room sounds”) and the constant pressure from venue owners to play the pre-digested mush that masqueraded as “commercial dance music”. Zenzi, with its strict “no Bollywood, no commercial music” policy, was the perfect fit.

Correya put his wealth of musical knowledge to full use, playing some of the freshest tunes across the drum & bass, breakbeats, funk and dub spectrum. “Kris knew how to work a crowd, educate them and make them have fun at the same time,” says music journalist Abhimanyu Meer, who also moonlights as a DJ. “He was one of the few real messengers bringing in new sounds.”

As head tastemaker for Zenzi, Correya constantly pushed the other resident DJs – including Mikhail D’Souza and Gordon Fernandes – to break out of their comfort zones and dig deeper. More importantly, he acted as a mentor for the younger DJs passing through, thanks to his policy of letting anyone with a good demo, recommendation or occasionally even a CD pack they’d brought to the bar take the decks for a spin. Amul Lokanathan, who started his DJ career at Zenzi under Correya, calls him “the Wikipedia of music” and says that “he gave me a proper education in both music and the music industry.” Reji Ravindran, aka DJ Reji, credits Correya for pushing him to drop the boring house and techno he was playing and return to his roots as a turntablist. Correya’s uncanny eye for talent is best exemplified by the story of how Candy D’Souza became one of the city’s first female DJs. D’Souza was a singer, with no experience as a DJ, who regularly collected underground music on her travels. Noticing her potential, Correya called her out of the blue and asked her to DJ at Zenzi. “Kris saw me as a DJ before even I did,” she says. D’Souza soon became a resident at the club, spinning underground hip-hop, soul and neo-soul. Lipstick Nights, which she helmed along with another debutant DJ – Ishani Mazumdar – were one of the venue’s most popular nights until it shut down in a blaze of cuss words in 2011.

It wasn’t just the DJs who benefited from Zenzi’s open door policy to music programming. In 2005, when Zenzi was still struggling to pull the crowds in, Correya suggested that they open the place up to live venues. “I said ‘Live?! Where is the space?’” laughs Kably, as he pours the two of us another shot of whisky. It’s getting a bit warm and fuzzy, though I’m not sure if that’s the alcohol or the obvious warmth in Kably’s voice as he talks about his partners in crime. “But Kris just wanted things to happen, and we also wanted some attention, so we decided to give it a try.”

Correya roped in electro-rock band Pentagram to play in the inner room. It was Pentagram’s first ever club gig, and in Kably’s words, it was “absolutely crazy”. Soon, Zenzi was programming a live gig almost every week, giving lots of current indie stars their first shot at the limelight. Randolph Correia met NYC exile, musician, wannabe actress and failed “high art project” curator Monica Dogra at Zenzi, and the two hit it off. In 2006, their band Shaa’ir + Func played its first set there. That set inspired Jeet Thayil and Suman Sridhar to start their own experimental music project Sridhar/Thayil, which also made its debut performance at Zenzi. By 2007-08, “it was a lab,” says Thayil. “There were experiments taking place and we never knew how they would turn out. We were trying things for the first time.”

And then there’s the legendary story of Raghu Dixit who had quit his job as an engineer to try a career in music. After three months of trying and failing to even get a meeting with a record label, he was ready to pack it in and head back to Bengaluru when a friend suggested he play a last-minute gig at Zenzi. In the audience were Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, who had just launched a new music label. The two quickly signed Dixit, and the rest is history. “There’s this mythical thing called A&R, which is basically talent scouting and having your finger on the pulse of what could be cool in two or three years,” says Arjun S Ravi. “And Zenzi used to do it, time and time again.”

He’s not exaggerating. Denzil Smith started organizing jazz poetry readings and book launches, reciting new poetry by poets like Dom Moraes, C P Surendran and Ranjit Hoskote to the rhythms of jazz music. There were performance art nights with artists in weird costumes stalking through the dining area, classical dance performances, play readings, vinyl club meetups and even an exhibition curated by Smith and Naresh Fernandes on Mumbai’s jazz history. There was the Open Mind Night, giving a stage to the city’s budding spoken word poets, comedians and singer-songwriters. One of the weirdest experiments would be Thayil’s Art of Noise event, which had half the crowd walk out in disgust. “I got together a bunch of musicians and the brief to the musicians was: no rehearsals, and try to have no melodies,” remembers Thayil. “There were five or six of us on stage and we were playing together for the first time. It was as much a revelation to us as it was to the audience. That kind of thing happened very regularly at Zenzi. There was an element of edge at Zenzi that I don’t think any other establishment or nightclub has ever been able to replicate.”

Kably says that the ready audience of regulars emboldened them to do weirder and weirder things. “We could throw stuff at them and see how it went. They lapped it up, the more experimental it was, the more they loved it.” Schabracq puts it best when he says, “We thought, why not? Who’s going to stop us?” before adding, ruefully, “well, they did stop us in the end.”

As person after person I spoke to talked about Zenzi as a “movement”, or a “family” space, where strangers would meet and be friends by the end of the night, I realized that this sounded exactly like British music journalist Simon Reynolds’ description of the early E bliss of UK rave culture. And in the early Noughties, Bandra was awash with drugs, especially Ecstasy. “This is not a drug story,” Kably insists, but admits that “it was there. It fuelled not only the music, it fuelled the scene. You reached behind the console and there was a 50/50 chance you’d find something.” Thayil is a bit more open. “There was a lot of E at the time, some acid, lots of cocaine. Basically the kind of drugs that would fuel long nights. Because those nights were long. There were after-after-after parties. There were innumerable nights when we saw the sun come up.” But the thing with E subcultures is that there will inevitably be a comedown. In 2008, the first hints were already there. Their nemesis, a second-floor resident annoyed by the sound and the constant partying, had begun his campaign to close down the venue. “His problem wasn’t just inconvenience,” remembers Correya, as he drains his fourth pint of beer at The Den, a regular DJ-friendly haunt for many Zenzi “orphans”. He laughs as he tells me about many evenings spent playing hide and seek with the resident, who would be waiting near the entrance to unload his litany of whingey complaints on any unfortunate member of Zenzi’s management he managed to corner. “If I saw him near the front entrance, I’d go around to sneak in from the back. I think he was also a little jealous. He kept on creating problems every day, over years. I was arrested twice or thrice. The last time, I was at Khar police station, with that guy screaming outside.”

But with the Zenzi Movement in full flow, the owners brushed him off as a minor annoyance. With their eyes set on expanding the Zenzi brand, they treated the occasional police raid as the price of doing business rather than a harbinger of things to come.

In 2008, the Zenzi partners – Kably, Schabracq, Sharad Mathur and newcomer Vishal Thakker, who had bought out the Dutch partners the year before – launched Zenzi Mills, a grimy, garage-y two-room club in Lower Parel’s Mathuradas Mills Compound, which wasn’t the mill-based simulacrum of Hauz Khas Village it is now. Inspired by New Order’s hit song “Crystal”, which Kably saw as the epitome of dance music, and boasting a state-of- the-art Funktion One soundsystem imported from the UK, the brief for Zenzi Mills was to be a “cutting-edge nightclub”. And it set out to do just that, programming highly successful nights featuring some of the hottest DJs from India and abroad. Regulars included bass music maestro DJ Uri, house/techno exponent Kini Rao, East London drum & bass collective Shiva Soundsystem and Delhi’s audio-visual pioneers BLOT!. Correya and French VJ Viktor Furiani also organized Mumbai’s first VJ festival, Wall of the VJs, which was instrumental in the art form’s subsequent popularity in the city. The upstairs room, reserved for the more avant-garde acts, hosted live music, experimental electronica and one legendary 22-minute reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” by Denzil Smith. But Zenzi Mills, short-lived as it was, will be best remembered as the home base for the dubstep and bass music scene that began its takeover of India’s nightlife.

“That’s where that whole dubstep thing crystallized,” says Kably. “By the time Zenzi Mills came along, it had all become a movement,” adds Sohail Arora, former Skincold vocalist and sometime Zenzi DJ. “It was when we realized that bass music was going to be huge.” Anil’s son Raffael, along with Arora and Correya, got together to form Bay Beat Collective, Mumbai’s pioneering dubstep and D&B outfit, and they started bringing down DJs from other cities who were also dabbling in the new sounds. By the time other clubs picked up on dubstep, Zenzi Mills was already its undisputed headquarters. It further cemented that reputation when Arora used it as the venue for his new property Bass Camp, India’s first music festival dedicated to bass music. Today, bass artists like Nucleya draw thousands of fans to their live shows. None of that would be possible without Zenzi – along with co-pioneers in Delhi and Bengaluru – aggressively pushing the sound into the mainstream.

But even as the bass scene took over the country in 2010, Zenzi Mills was in trouble. By the end of the year, the owners were forced to sell it off due to low turnout on the weekdays. Meanwhile, Zenzi Bandra’s struggles with its second-floor neighbour, who had by then filed a court case and regularly complained to the police and the BMC, had become the symbol of the larger fight between Bandra residents and its new crop of bars and nightclubs. Waterfield Road now had so many clubs and bars alongside Zenzi that Denzil Smith called it “the Golden Mile”. Similar developments had taken place in residential neighbourhoods all over Bandra, like Linking Road (On Toes, Hawaiian Shack) and Union Park (a constantly rotating cast of eateries), and residents had had enough. When a big local daily ran a front page piece saying that Zenzi was surviving because of ties to then-Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil – which Kably and the rest deny absolutely – it was the beginning of the end. Fearing a backlash from angry residents, the police and the BMC issued show-cause notices to the bar. Then, in February 2010, the Bombay High Court ordered the demolition of Zenzi’s much-loved outside section. “That tore the soul out of Zenzi,” says Kably, staring out at the sea from his balcony. “I resigned as director and got out.” Schabracq had already returned to Amsterdam after six years in India by then, frustrated with the corruption and the daily hassle of dealing with the cops and the BMC. Correya had also quit because of health issues. The remaining partners – Mathur and Thakker – says Kably, “didn’t have a clue.”

“We all knew the end was near,” Amul Lokanathan, who remained on as resident DJ till the very end, says over the phone. “The cops and the BMC were raiding us regularly and the business was being affected.” After a few months punctuated by periodic shut-downs, the Zenzi story finally came to an end in October 2011 with a flurry of swear words and at least one rendition of Mumbai’s infamous BC/MC chant. “It changed the people who hung out there,” says Smith. “It contributed to so much dialogue, there was a lot of exchange across different disciplines.” “There was a real sense that we were part of a happening, of a peak moment in all our lives,” adds Thayil. “If Zenzi were to re-open today, I might move back to Bandra.”